Then he drew nearer to her, and said in a dry and dreadful voice:
"Oh, don't condescend to play the fool with such a fool as me.
Are you really locked up here as a patient--because you helped us
to escape?"

"Yes," she said, still smiling, but her steady voice had a shake
in it.

Evan flung his big elbow across his forehead and burst into
tears.

The pure lemon of the sky faded into purer white as the great
sunset silently collapsed. The birds settled back into the trees;
the moon began to glow with its own light. Mr. James Turnbull
continued his botanical researches into the structure of the
rhododendron. But the lady did not move an inch until Evan had
flung up his face again; and when he did he saw by the last gleam
of sunlight that it was not only his face that was wet.

Mr. James Turnbull had all his life professed a profound interest
in physical science, and the phenomena of a good garden were
really a pleasure to him; but after three-quarters of an hour or
so even the apostle of science began to find rhododendrus a bore,
and was somewhat relieved when an unexpected development of
events obliged him to transfer his researches to the equally
interesting subject of hollyhocks, which grew some fifty feet
farther along the path. The ostensible cause of his removal was
the unexpected reappearance of his two other acquaintances
walking and talking laboriously along the way, with the black
head bent close to the brown one. Even hollyhocks detained